March 20

Last night a frigid wind blew into New Orleans. It rattled the windows, mercilessly sporadic, and I barely slept. We live in a camelback in New Orleans and the entire front bit of it is our master bedroom, and it has a lot of windows, including full length floor to ceiling ones that we step through to get to our narrow front porch. I found myself googling “DIY muffle a window casement” at 5am.

It was 80 degrees yesterday, it’s 59 today. I won’t complain.

The Prof and our two oldest boys are backpacking in Georgia. It’s just Craiggy and me this week. I have an Easter craft for us to do tonight. I’m looking for a tolerable movie-theater movie for a Friday night date. He’s a blast. This morning in the car he asked me “does my Nerf bow and arrow count as an ‘unsecured weapon’?” Uh, what? Turns out he invited his little bestie Ian to spend the night, and Ian asked him if we have any unsecured weapons in our house. I tried not to laugh. “He means guns, hun, and no we don’t have any guns in our house at all.” We just recently hosted a birthday party for Craig and Ian had been there, so I asked Craig to describe him to see if I remember him. “Well, he carries a black backpack at school, he is on the baseball team . . .” Oh yeah, that guy. “Curly brown hair. Real skinny. Mixed skin tone.” I do remember him – he’s a sweet one. He has a baby sister with Down syndrome – she came to the birthday party too and watched the boys intently, fascinated by all the big kids.